5 unique quotes from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One

5 unique quotes from Peter Thiel’s Zero to One

Peter Thiel is an American entrepreneur, author, businessman, and one of the first professional investors of Facebook with 500000$ in its early start-up stage. Either, he is co-founder of Paypal and Palantir.

His brilliant masterpiece – Zero to One is worth reading where he spectacularly delivers a completely different look how to create value in the world. This book is a must-read one for young entrepreneurs and business professionals who sought to make 0’s to 1.

Katalatto team selected the best 5 quotes from the would-be-handbook of entrepreneurs:

The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative.

Every moment in the business happens only once. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.Of course, it ’s easier to copy a model than to make something new. Doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to N, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the results are something fresh and strange.

Beginnings are special. They are qualitatively different from all that comes afterward. This was true 13.8 billion years ago, at the founding of our cosmos: in the earliest microseconds of its existence, the universe expanded by a factor of 10 30 — a million trillion. As cosmogonic epochs came and went in those first few moments, the very laws of physics were different from those we know today. Companies are like in this way. Bad decisions made early on—if you choose the wrong partners or hire the wrong people, for example—are very hard to correct after they are made. It may take a crisis on the order of bankruptcy before anybody will even try to correct them. As a founder, your first job is to get the first things right, because you cannot build a great company on a flawed foundation.

The first team that I built has become known in Silicon Valley as the “PayPal Mafia” because so many of my former colleagues have gone on to help each other start and invest in successful tech companies. We sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5 billion in 2002. Since then, Elon Musk has founded SpaceX and co-founded Tesla Motors; Reid Hoffman co-founded LinkedIn; Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim together founded YouTube; Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons founded Yelp; David Sacks co-founded Yammer, and I co-founded Palantir. Today all seven of those companies are worth more than $1 billion each.

5. Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that, you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future.